We're easily impressed with quick comebacks from politicians and stand-up comedians. Sometimes we wish we too could instantly put bullies & other critics in their place. Contestants who do well on quiz shows like 'Jeopardy' impress us how quickly they can match a short description to a name on a broad range of topics. Most tests & exams nowadays are 'multiple choice,' where again, one performs such quick matches.
Of the majority of adults who could match 'the most famous tower in Paris' with 'Eiffel tower,' what percentage could write an intelligent one-page essay on the Eiffel tower, or even Paris? Maybe 2%? The other 98% may respond that writing an essay would be 'too deep' or that they 'don't care.'
Increasingly, depth of knowledge (never mind wisdom), is considered too time-consuming & too boring to acquire! Now even university graduates - including most of their profs - don't deserve to be called 'intellectual elites,' which is actually being 'weaponized' as a pejorative! We're drowning in quick & dirty clichés & sound bites, which are mostly inaccurate, false, and at times malicious.
Many, like jet-ski enthusiasts, are drawn to skim the surface as fast as possible.
“... our
culture [is] so conditioned on unforgiving cynicism and distracted flight from
presence.”
Very few - like deep-sea divers - carefully investigate the still, silent depths of the ocean. AND when we do, "What emerges is that supreme gift of being: a deeper sense of belonging ..." (Maria Popova, in David Whyte's "Consolations.") This choice always awaits each of us.
Before I quote a small portion of Whyte's wonderful mystical word paintings on 'joy,' I'll give them a bit of context.
A year or so ago, I was with my then 22-month old granddaughter as she sat making chalk drawings on the sidewalk with her little friend, almost the same age. This little girl's Mom, sitting beside her, & I recognized the treasure of being in & enjoying their wonderful magical new world. At this mostly pre-verbal stage, there's an obvious, an almost tangible, yet nonverbal communication between us - WHEN adults give ourselves permission to relax into it.
Once I dreamt that my wife was talking to me as we sat at a table. While she was speaking, I saw her lips move, yet she made no sounds at all. Nevertheless, I 'heard' & understood everything, just as if she had actually produced audible sounds.
“Joy is a meeting place, of deep intentionality and of self-forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formerly seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music in the kitchen, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of laughter. The sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was radically other than us.
To feel a full and untrammelled joy is to have become fully generous; to allow ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious, worried self, felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness and the vulnerability of its imminent loss, felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source: the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a well-loved familiar face. I was here, and you were here, and together we made a world.”
David Whyte. “Consolations. The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.” Canongate, 2019.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Hamlet, William Shakespeare
“Stay in your body and come home to your heart again & again & again.” Mirabai Starr
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| Mental Disciplines Joel & Michelle Levey WisdomAtWork.com |
